The GenX Reader.

Whatever your age, dear readers, I officially nominate this book as the one most embarrassing to be seen with on a public conveyance--even after spotting a guy on the subway reading 1001 Ways to Be Romantic, who, before I scanned the title, looked relatively nonpathetic. As we learn from The GenX Reader, "twenty-somethings" or "busters" distinguish themselves from the more earnest and economically fulfilled (baby) "boomers" by their mastery of irony and self-reflexive texts. Having watched Richard Nixon's resignation on TV as impressionable tots, they are purported to have developed a healthy distrust of public policy, advertisers--perhaps everything except nose rings. I don't know about you, darlings, but I look forward to the day when young people sell bumper stickers saying "Never Trust Anyone with a Pierced Face." Nevertheless, I challenge any "Xer" to consume this volume as a moment of style irony. I mean, I'm sorry, while it is filled with lots of good stuff, no self-respecting "Xer" would touch this anthology with a ten-foot pole, so I wonder for whom is it intended. Those who have spent the last year abroad or in a coma will be eager to read of the travails of the twenty-somethings and their collective privation in terms of money, jobs, real estate, and oh yeah, prospects for the future. Most irritating are the editor's deliriously enthusiastic presentations of each "outsider," "buster" contributor as if pitching them to an audience of nodding self-appointed Xer poster-children, concerned parents, and Coca-Cola ad execs. This book is cheerful evidence of the entropic law of culture by which at the moment something is totally known and over, that's when the book, movie, and magazine spread comes out about it (and replicates it)--a phenomenon to which this review, I am all too aware, is contributing. OK, so I guess it makes sense. Whatever.

"To package oneself or not to package oneself" emerges as the obsessive question working the last nerves of today's savvy slacker (slavvy?) Hamlets. Plunged so precociously into media-induced cynicism, they've come out the other side into an equally strained idealism that takes techie stuff as its privileged object. Nevertheless, there are so many lovely writers in the volume (in fact, most of them) that I am fortified in my belief in the written word (and continue to wonder why it's supposed to be such a bigger deal when it's on-line). Packaging slick representative tidbits of today's youth (from predictable samples of Douglas Coupland, the divine Richard Linklater, Beavis and Butt-head, the I Hate Brenda Newsletter, and Ice Cube to lesser-knowns [by me anyway] like the delightful Earth Girl, Walter Kirn, "now 20"-year-old college applicant Hugh Gallagher, plus cartoons and mainstream media coverage), the volume's one unifying thread is the compulsion with which the various pieces self-consciously pit "boomers" against "busters" in an inexorable battle for dominance as advertising target groups. One imagines ad execs poring through this volume for the latest hooks into the slim purses of today's pragmatic, environmentally concerned young who can click between apathy and righteousness faster than you can decide you hate your hair.

Like a manic-depressive teen, the book veers between dour sociological diagnoses of twenty-something disenfranchisement and high-spirited amor fati of downward mobility--e.g, in do-it-yourself raves and 'zines, making literature out of your torpor--ending with a "self-referential tour de force, teaching busters how to get paid for marketing GenX aesthetics back to ourselves" when "inside expert on the slacker phenom" Mondo 2000 columnist Andrew Hultkrans advises all you "alternative" people out there to "face the Muzak. . . . If you don't sell your 'counterculture' image, someone else will." The volume terminates with the pretty image of the now supposedly even more enlightened Buster seizing "the media by the hips and taking the plunge. . . . "Safe sex. Cool.

Rhonda Lieberman's column "Glamour Wounds" appears regularly in Artforum.